In France at least. For all the flack about inversions and tax havens, google gets very little mention here on CF. But after all this is a company that attempts to deny to the Chinese people that the Tiananmen Square event ever happened or that the Falun Gong and Tibetans are being persecuted by the Politburo. [rQUOTEr]Investigators raid Google Paris HQ in tax evasion inquiry French investigators raided Google's (GOOGL.O) Paris headquarters on Tuesday as part of a tax evasion inquiry, the financial prosecutor's office said. Google said it was fully complying with French law. Facing public anger at the way multinational companies use their footprints around the world to minimize tax, France, Britain and others have sought ways to make sure Google, Yahoo! and other digital giants, who often have their tax bases in other countries, pay their taxes locally. Investigators from the financial prosecutors office and France's central office against corruption and tax fraud, accompanied by 25 IT specialists, took part in the raid. "The investigation aims to verify whether Google Ireland Ltd has a permanent base in France and if, by not declaring parts of its activities carried out in France, it failed its fiscal obligations, including on corporate tax and value added tax," the prosecutor's office said in statement. Google has based its regional headquarters in Dublin where corporate tax rates are lower than elsewhere in Europe. ...[/rQUOTEr]
Not surprised. There has never before been a company with such influence over its own PR, that's what's really Brave New World-ish about Google.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html Google does a lot more than avoid taxes though. It kills innovation, privacy and a whole lot more in the pursuit of its ultimate goals. I don't think the tagline for Google should be "do no evil", it should be "we've been fairly f**king obvious about our goals and we'll stop at nothing to accomplish them." “Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete." - Larry Page, October 2000 “HAL had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Hopefully it would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship. But that [level of artificial intelligence] is what we’re striving for, and I think we’ve made it a part of the way there.” - Sergey Brin, November 2002 "By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate." - Ray Kurzweil
hey, some people like talking about hunting season, NOBAMA, #nevertrump, ISLAMIA, I like talking about AI. different strokes different folks
I wonder where the French Investigators got this impression https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Google/@48.87733,2.3277525,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x47e66e30ecee128b:0x2fad446b03297242!8m2!3d48.87733!4d2.3299412
Because google glass was such a hit. I get it, google is ambitious but they aren't the search engine provider in town anymore:
Google Glass might have been a miss, but Android wasn't. It's in Google's blood to succeed really well at a few things, and fail really badly at most. "Moonshot thinking" has casualties. As for your market share numbers--even better to avoid anti-trust regulation. If you've ever remotely touched user acquisition, let me know the people who start with Bing ads then go to Adwords. But weren't we agreeing that Google is abusing its power? Anyways, the point I was trying to make is that Google was never about being a search engine provider. Adwords was more or less a happy accident. The goal has always been the largest training data set the world has ever known, and an incomparable distributed computing infrastructure to take advantage of it.
Lot's of companies, besides just google, are probably going to be good at a few things and be bad at many other things. That's the nature of business development, research and development, etc - that's just how a lot of businesses run. However, I'm not ready to allow google to use extortionary tactics like saying the US needs to remain the leader/competitive in technology and that it needs tax havens to remain competitive. Essentially google could be saying that it alone represents all things technological in the US - which it clearly does not. That being said, their probable tax evasion has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.
pfft, that's nothing. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/c...ght-overthrow-of-syrias-assad/article/2586300
Um, there are probably a handful of other businesses in the world that can "fail" and "succeed" at the scale Google can. Android has 1.6 billion Monthly Active Users. Their probable tax evasion also has nothing to do with Tiananmen Square, but carry on--I thought this was the general s**ting on Google thread. I guess I am mistaken, and you want to have a much less interesting debate on corporate tax practices (of which Google is not the first to test, and of which Google will not be the last).
Stitched together those CSVs yet? Talk me when you have. One step at a time breh. Until then, enjoy talking about tax evasion isolated to one company (?).